I grew up with bright, impractical dreams of a career in performing. My family did several productions together in the chorus of the Indianapolis Opera company before I hit double digits. There were acting camps, conservatories, after-school drama clubs, Saturday morning improv classes, an original oratory in my one and only speech competition—I liked creating through the use of my body and voice, holding someone's attention to tell them what I or a playwright had deemed important. I dropped most of those ambitions by the middle of high school. But lately I've been figuring out how to tap into that energy for more journalistic endeavors, which has yielded some pretty fun projects in the last few years. 

Radio Atlantic and 2016 Distilled

I was lucky enough to get to work with the small cohort of folks at The Atlantic to produce our flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic. Over several months leading up to its July 2017 debut, we produced several rough pilot episodes to get our feet underneath us and settle on a format. Matt Thompson and NPR veteran Alice Winkler were incredible to work with in these early brainstorming weeks, as was Kevin Townsend, who joined us as a full-time producer that summer. 

The previous year, I pitched a web series to branch off of our effort to collect questions from readers and use them to guide coverage. The election presented itself as an ideal pilot season, and this thing quickly became the project I pour the most of myself into every day at work, whether we're planning, shooting, editing (or rather, agonizing over final cuts), or just figuring out how to make it better and more useful. The goal with these is to demystify the political process—explain some of the wonkier sides of democracy and give the audience some big-picture analysis they can take away from each episode.

Check out the show for yourself here.

VOSD Radio

Co-hosting Voice of San Diego's podcast with land-use reporter Andrew Keatts and Editor-in-Chief Scott Lewis was one of my most fun (and routinely stressful) responsibilities. Here's the February 2014 episode about engagement when Scott and Andy asked me to be their special guest that week, and a one-on-one interview I recorded with an especially inspiring entrepreneur in July 2015. To hear some of my co-hosting episodes, browse VOSD's archives here from then until August 2015.

San Diego Explained

VOSD does a weekly series with media partner NBC 4 San Diego to highlight some of the nonprofit's coverage and dig briefly into wonkier concepts that TV audiences might not be familiar with. These sometimes cheesy packages were genuinely fun to shoot—Catherine Garcia is a pro, through and through. I got to collaborate with her on three episodes in 2015. 

Head to VOSD's site to watch my segments on beating the summer slide, navigating open enrollment, and dealing with police.